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LOOK AGAIN AT THE SECOND SCENE OF ACT 2 WHICH STARTS WITH THE STAGE DIRECTION THE ROOM IS EMPTY WRITE ABOUT THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS SCENE PAYING ATTENTION TO STOPPARDS PRESENTATION OF CHARACTER AS WELL AS HIS DEVELOPMENT OF PLOT Throughout the entire course of the play Arcadia Tom Stoppard carefully advances and unravels details of both character and plot in each scene letting information out a bit at a time so that as we learn more so more questions are raised that are answered in later scenes et cetera This very careful and deliberate construction of the plays layers is particularly evident in scene six the second scene of the second act of the play It is in this scene that many of the plot strands that have been slowly building in the 1800s section of the play finally come to some kind of climax indeed this is the last scene to be set in 1809 and brings the action there to a close the 1800s portion of scene seven being set three years later in 1812 We learn some very important details about the characters of Lady Croom and Septimus Hodge in this scene making it in many ways the crux of the whole play or at the very least the 1800s sections of it The first major fact to bear in mind about this scene is that it is perhaps surprisingly the shortest of the entire play running to just five pages in total This means that Stoppard is packing an incredible amount of detail into a much smaller space than he does in the rest of the play which makes paying attention to the dialogue all the more important because it is in this scene that there is the biggest danger of missing something Scene six begins with Septimus returning to the house early in the morning after we the audience know that his duel should have

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